the feeling of absurdity

Last stop of the day, pulling in to fill up the gas tank. I set the pump trigger latch in place and walked around to the passenger side for something. While there, I took a moment to get my small boar-bristle brush out of the glovebox and give my beard a smoothing-down. I’ve been letting it grow for the last few months, so it requires a lot more grooming now.

“Feels good, don’t it?”

I turned around to look over at the next pump island for the source of the voice, where I saw what appeared to be Billy Gibbons dressed in biker leather, next to his beat-up old pickup.

“I brush mine like that all the time. Love it,” he said, affectionately patting the fringe of his long, grey facial mane.

“Oh, yeah,” I concurred. “I wish someone had told me about these earlier. I used to use a comb, but it made it all—” I used my hands to indicate the universal sign language for wild, frizzy hair.

He winced as if he’d seen someone brandish a set of electric clippers in his direction. “Ooh, no, never a comb, no. Always gotta be a brush.”

He made as if to get back in his truck before hesitating, his head still turned halfway in my direction, as if listening to some internal monologue. A moment later, he turned back and ambled over toward me.

“Now, look, young feller,” he began, in a friendly-conspiratorial tone of voice, “I made myself a promise a long time ago never to get involved in another man’s beardly business. You can see I’ve been around a good long while, and I tell you what, you never get over the pain of seeing a man you’ve encouraged spend years growing out his beard the way the good Lord intended, only to cut it all off because of a job or some damned woman.”

He spat to punctuate his disgust before fixing me with one steely eye from under the brim of his hat. Taking the measure of me, I thought. I kept quiet and stoically bore his scrutiny, letting my beard do the talking for me. Was that the slightest crack in his stony façade, a tiny upturn in the corner of his mouth?

It was. He grinned an almost-imperceptible grin and shook his finger at me in a mock-admonishing way. “You, though…damn it all if I ain’t a sentimental old fool, but the careful, dedicated way you wield that brush tells me you ain’t gonna go that route.”

“No, sir,” I agreed. “My woman, she loves my beard the more it grows out.”

He sighed, his breath the sound of so many hair clippings fluttering, unmourned, to the floor. “Be that as it may, son, in this world, there’s many a cold winter wind blows through a man’s life with no woman there to share it with. You treat that beard like the brother it is, because it’ll be there for you when that wind’s a-whistlin’ somethin’ fierce, no questions asked.”

Pausing to make sure his words had sunk in, he reached deep into a jacket pocket and fished something out. He held out his hand, and as I took it, he clasped his other one tight around the back and held it for a moment.

The overall sleek shine, the way the potion enhances the blond hairs to glow like a golden fire, and the lively notes of pine, cedar and mint that aromatically dance around my face now are the only things that convince me I didn’t imagine the whole thing.

“You missed one, here.” With my pen, I indicated the box still awaiting his signature.

“Ahh, sheesh,” he said, with a sheepish shake of his head. “I’m still not all the way awake today!”

It was 3:30 in the afternoon.

“Dude…it’s okay. No need to save face. You’re as awake as you’ll ever be. You just made a simple mistake. An oversight that happens to everyone. It’s not a weakness or a disadvantage. Hell, if you think about it, the awkward excuse actually makes you look sillier than a momentary lapse of attention! Isn’t it funny how complicated we make social interactions just to avoid being seen too clearly? What are we really afraid of? But it’s all good. Everything’s all right. Smile and enjoy this beautiful day.”

Of course I didn’t actually say that. I played my part in the social script. Just a sympathetic “heh” and a nod. Too much honesty’s liable to get you an ass-kicking. Look away, pretend you didn’t see any vulnerability.

“[The Jerky Boys] are perennially hilarious,” reasons MacFarlane. “They don’t sound like they were recorded years ago. It’s not even really about the shock value, you want to hear what they’re going to say next. Brennan could release another album of those calls and people would still eat them up.”

Meh. Innovators are due a certain respect, but I never found the Jerky Boys all that funny. Prank calls with soundboards, though, develop the surreal aspect of the joke to its full potential. Having a limited number of preprogrammed responses to use leads to more bizarre non-sequiturs, which only increases the victim’s frustration and adds to the chaotic absurdity. It’s especially funny to hear an unwitting victim furiously arguing with a recording of hizzorher own voice.

The twitosphere, pretty much. We’re all implicated. I tend to occupy the fourth and fifth word-balloons myself. Maybe I’ll achieve that final level of meta soon!

There are many worse ways to spend your time than browsing his archives.

Speaking of animals and surreality, today I passed a Volvo on the highway. The dude had a pet monkey sitting on his dashboard. I think it was a capuchin, but I can’t be sure. It came over to the driver’s side and stared at me as I passed, and I watched it in the rearview mirror just scampering back and forth along the dash. Now, I don’t know about you, but any passenger in my car possessed of opposable thumbs, let alone a prehensile tail, must be capable of being reasoned with. That’s simply a non-negotiable. Otherwise, you’re riding in a cage, and that is that.

So Owl gave me the first intimation in my life that all are not wise who claim to be learned. And Owl was a hint also that the clever could be the most foolish of all.

But why did owls symbolise wisdom in the first place? The splendid photos in my book, succinctly titled Owls, suggested a reason: owls seem to have only two states, the serene calmness of sleep and the most intense alertness when awake. Try as we might not to anthropomorphise, owls look serious; they indulge in no foolish or redundant movement. This is nonsense, of course: owls are bird-brained. And one of the things that I learnt from this book, delightful to me because completely useless, is that the Owl of Minerva does not necessarily spread her wings at dusk: nearly forty per cent of the 133 extant species of owls are diurnal, not nocturnal. I bet you didn’t know that.

…The law of unintended consequences is one of the hardest for people to learn because it is so unflattering to our conception of ourselves as rational beings, and because (if it is a law) it suggests inherent limits to our power. We shall never fail to commit errors.

Those excerpts are indeed all from the same essay, an essay which just so happens to be about two of my favorite things: owls and unintended consequences. Naturally, I had to acknowledge it.

Once in my teenage years, after a soccer game, some teammates and I were eating dinner at a restaurant. Somehow, the conversation turned to deciding which animal we each resembled. The consensus was that I was, of course, an owl. Possibly because of my wide eyes, serious expression and quiet bookishness. Or possibly because of my ability to move silently and swivel my head 270°.

Whatever the case, I shortly thereafter underwent the ritual to adopt the owl as my spirit animal. Climbing a tree under a full moon, I hooted and prayed for a vision, while doing my best to resemble a feathered harbinger of death. Soon, my sacred quest was rewarded by the rustle of prey in the leaves below, which turned out to be my mom who had come looking for me. She did admit that my downward swoop was silent and terrifying, at least.

Since then, I have been blessed with the supernatural abilities to win any staring contest and to snatch up a swiftly running rodent with my bare hand.

“Fuck!” he exclaimed from the backseat. “I can’t get a signal because we’re out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“What are the odds,” I said to her beside me, “that people always find themselves smack dab in the middle of nowhere? How come it’s never, ‘I’m on the outskirts of nowhere’? ‘I’m passing through the suburbs of nowhere’? ‘I’m about one-quarter of the way to Nowhere Central, where the horizon and the landmarks are just starting to lose their distinctiveness’?”

“Or ‘on the edge of nowhere’?” she replied.

“Well, if you were on the edge of nowhere, you’d actually be somewhere,” he chimed in.

“Good point,” she responded.

“Maybe ‘nowhere’ isn’t actually a place,” I speculated. “Maybe it’s more like an amorphous fog that follows you around, so that when it settles, you’re perfectly in the middle of it.”

“Or maybe, as much as an affront to common sense as it seems,” I continued, “we really are in the middle of nowhere, right here in rural Virginia. This is it, the fabled epicenter.”

“The literal epicenter. Equidistant.” she said, nodding along.

“Yes, literally. It extends way out into the Atlantic ocean on one side, and out into… I dunno, the Midwest on the other. But we happen to be perfectly centered at this moment, right here.”

We paused a moment to reflect on the momentous significance of all this, on our humbling privilege.

That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime.

— Holden Caulfield

I spent a pleasant morning hiking up a small mountain to a steep overlook from a rocky outcropping. The fog was too thick to take any good pictures, but I didn’t mind. It was overcast and breezy, hinting at rain, just chilly enough to let you know that fall would be here soon. I only passed four other people along the way, so for most of the walk, there was nothing to listen to but the susurrus of the wind through the trees and the first leaves beginning their gravitational pilgrimage. After an hour, I got to the top and sat for a while to eat a banana and sip a thermos of coffee flavored with vanilla cha’i. The fog was thick enough to be vertiginous; if not for the rock underneath me, I could have just as easily imagined myself lost at sea.

So after sitting and meditating for a bit, I headed back down, only to see something etched on the rocks that I had missed on the way up:

Alas, ol’ Holden was right. But it made me wonder: what kind of person makes the arduous trip up the mountain, surrounded by all that natural beauty, with enough hate in their heart to make that the crowning achievement of the journey? There were worse defacements, many with spraypaint, but this was the only one I saw that was so angry. Not an affirmation of their existence, but a rejection of yours. Not a vain plea for attention and validation from indifferent strangers and an uncaring universe, but a denial of everyone else’s. This was the distilled essence of our unknown author’s eloquence, the depths of his or her poetic soul revealed to us, perhaps even to be found millennia from now by future archaeologists studying the collapse of Western civilization. A textual middle finger of salutation offered to the world.

As I pondered Caulfield’s words, I was inspired to a similar vision of being a protector of innocence. I wanted to do my part to shield unsuspecting children from having an enjoyable day in the mountains sullied by profanity etched into the splendor of the forest. I wanted to help preserve this little enclave of peacefulness for those who came out here to get away from the madness of day-to-day life.

So when I saw a small group of twenty-somethings coming up the trail, talking loudly, texting away on their phones, I became suspicious. Maybe I’m guilty of profiling, but it seemed to me that here we had a perfect example of the kind of people most likely to declare their eternal love for each other with a Sharpie on a rock, or a carving in a tree. These were likely the kind of people who left the empty beer can, ziplock bag and mismatched pair of socks I had passed on the trail below. Could I take a chance that the forest would be defiled further, right under my nose?

Of course not. So I waited for them to get directly underneath me before pushing one of the larger rocks loose, down onto their heads. One of the guys was only dealt a glancing blow on the shoulder, though, so to my severe annoyance, I had to give chase for a while through the undergrowth before I caught up to him. Luckily, his shrieks of terror and labored breathing made it easy to find him in the fog. Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t about to lug his heavy carcass back to his companions, so he had to be buried separately. And to top if off, I got a really painful scratch on my calf! But at least I could rest easy, having done my duty as a vigilante park ranger.

It occurred to me as I was heading back to my car that I had apparently mixed my memories of Catcher in the Rye with Lord of the Flies, but please, let’s not quibble over the minutiae of classic literature.

I thought I had seen it all when it came to unconscionable desecration of the image of Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes). Even though Bill Watterson never made his work available for merchandising, you still see stickers and window decals of Calvin being used to symbolize contempt for various NASCAR drivers via a stream of urine and an evil smirk, or as a religious simpleton kneeling in prayer before a cross. There is no end to the number of treasures these cretins will defile with their filthy hands.

But this, now… I saw a truck yesterday with an image in the back glass of Calvin defiantly holding up a middle finger and a Confederate flag, right next to another stars ‘n’ bars sticker reading “Rebel Pride”. So I did the only thing a reasonable man could have done.

I followed him to his destination and waited for him to park and head into the building, whereupon I walked over, stuffed a rag into his gas tank, lit it on fire, hopped back in the car and drove off. As I looked back in the rearview mirror, mine eyes saw the glory of the orange fireball blossoming over the ridge. Up in flames like Atlanta under General Sherman, I tell you what.

Mess with the greatest comic strip ever written, and my wrath will be merciless, swift and sure.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.